A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whatever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it.
American journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.
An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.
Can you blame me if I am pursued by the thought of how much we could do to remedy social evils, if only we had an honest and disinterested press?
Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.
Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
For the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.
Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure- such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.
I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces.
I just put on what the lady says. I've been married three times, so I've had lots of supervision.
I'm going to stop squandering money for things I don't want. I'm going to stop accepting invitations, and meeting people I don't like and don't want to know.
In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power.
Is it a Utopian dream, that once in history a ruling class might be willing to make the great surrender, and permit social change to come about without hatred, turmoil, and waste of human life?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.
It is futile to try and win democracy abroad, while we are losing it at home.
(in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson).
(in a letter to President Woodrow Wilson).
Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.
Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?
Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.
One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.
Pessimism is mental disease. It means illness in the person who voices it, and in the society which produces that person.
The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label.
The first thing brought forth by the study of any religion, ancient or modern, is that it is based upon Fear, born of it, fed by it- and that it cultivates the source from which its nourishment is derived.
The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.
The supreme crime of the church today is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.
There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where things are behind bars, and the man is outside.
They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?
Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid.
You don't have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it. I didn't like the way I found America some sixty years ago, and I've been trying to change it ever since.
Found 32 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).
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